Disappearing Into the Seen
by Valieara
Summary: Once a possible means of lending credibility to their story if there were ever a chance for them to come out of hiding, now Simon pored over her letters searching for River-in-evolution, River-in-revolution.


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc. Title and excerpt below are from "Orpheus and Eurydice," which is Jorie Graham's. _Sleeping Beauty _is Tchaikovsky's. _Firefly_ is Whedon's.

**Setting/Spoilers: **Probably pre-BDM, but with oblique references to something River and Simon both knew that was revealed in it.

**Notes: **First _Firefly _fic, after being shown that this show/fandom is as much fun as I've always heard, albeit ten years late. Unsurprisingly, River and Simon own my heart.

* * *

><p><em>What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustiness,<em>

_but without their steps on it, their prints, without_

_song—_

_What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you_

_understand this?)—what she dreamed_

_was of disappearing into the seen_

_not of disappearing, lord, into the real—_

Jorie Graham, "Orpheus and Eurydice"

* * *

><p>i.<p>

River had been the first and only pure thing in his life. Not, of course, that his life up until the point he'd boarded _Serenity_ with his heart in his throat and his sister in a box had been particularly fraught with crime or evil, but it had nevertheless been muddled by its own pristine existence. His memory of life before River was a collage of off-whites and beiges, large rooms redolent with wealth and finery, tutors with a procession of maths and letters, and a distant almost-affection emanating from his parents in the background.

Then River, vibrant and loud and beautiful. Simon could remember:

As a baby, River's eyes had seemed even bigger than they were now, settled into her adult features. (_All the better to see you with, my dear, _River had parroted at him so many times, said eyes sparkling and face deadpan, leering claw-fingers optional.) She was a brat ninety percent of the time, annoyed him to the point he nearly pulled out his hair, and made him love her for it all the while, laughing just out of his reach the entire time. She could and did outpace him in everything she even attempted. Her mind moved like she danced, and she danced with the precision of a scientist and the passion of an artist. There had never been even the smallest chance that she could have lived an unobtrusive life.

She was still a brat, on her good days. She still danced, when the notion took her. She would read more, but they had so few books on _Serenity._ Sometimes she spent time on the bridge with Wash, listening attentively as he indiscriminately told her about the logistics of flying a Firefly and played with the dinosaurs that sat proudly on the console. She mostly sketched, or scribbled math or literature or science or mythology that was incomprehensible to him - but then, it had been difficult for him to follow even before. She worked differently. So much of her mind had been distorted, but her essence was the same, and he couldn't _not_ be grateful for that.

River looked up at him from across the room, and smiled. "Silly Simon," she teased him. "He wishes the family would understand. They can't. They haven't acquired the data. It's qualitative. It can't be quantified even for you. It's impossible for them."

He knew the crew did sometimes wonder about the strength of his and River's relationship, knew that when they were feeling generous some of them talked about how he cared for her, or put up with her. On his lowest days, it was true enough that was how he felt, though he would never say it aloud, but most of the time the sentiment left him frustrated. They'd never known River as anything but a troubled young teenage girl, prone to saying strange things and behaving oddly on her good days, and screaming insensibly or slashing men across the chest with a butcher's knife on her bad days.

"She's still herself," River told him. "Just buried deeper. And scattered. Sometimes she chases pieces of herself around her mind, but she's still here."

"I know," Simon assured her, going to sit next to her on her bunk, and letting her lean against his shoulder.

"I wanted to see my brother," she whispered. "I couldn't make a sound."

He drew her closer, felt her burrow into him. "You do now."

She nodded. "You're afraid of me going out, but part of me has already gone out."

"How so?" Simon asked slowly.

"Poof. Like a candle. Light is metaphoric so much of the time. You're afraid of me going out, but part of me has already, and so has a part of you. I can feel it. Reach in looking for warmth, and find the cold where I don't expect it."

River had lightly pressed her hand against his chest, and was looking at it as though she wanted to push through the barriers of cloth and skin and muscle and bone, but couldn't figure out a way to do it without killing him.

"There's only warmth for you," Simon told her, tightening his arm across her shoulders reflexively, but didn't deny it. He didn't move her hand.

"Wrong. I remember brother in a uniform," she said dreamily. "Cold blue. Medical blue. Blue like ice at its coldest. He made himself cold for her, broke in and no one suspected until he reached in and pulled her out, and she'd been made to freeze. So much _blue_. Needles in her head. Hiding on the ceiling. It was so easy. Easier than it should have been."

Simon shivered despite himself. "It took me three years to get inside," he reminded her. "It wasn't easy."

River shot him a look warning him not to patronize her. "Not that," she said. "River, cold like ice. It's a simple phase change. I can be cold too, easier than you, even though you don't like to think so. There are words you learned for me that you haven't had to use yet – but _you learned them anyway_. Energy is potential, light is metaphoric. Until it isn't."

ii.

When he'd left his life, he'd taken with him four changes of clothes, a small medical kit of essentials and lesser essentials he'd stolen overtime from the hospital, seven books on various subjects, his journal, all the credits he'd been allowed to withdraw at one time from his account, and all of River's letters from the Academy. Even when she'd seemed fine, when there had been no indication that something was wrong or that there was something she was trying to communicate to him alone, he'd kept her letters out of sentimentality, and was glad he had. He'd obsessed over the whole collection for months before he'd cracked her code, and knew each one from the inside out. He had extensive notes on each of them, had copied the originals in order to not destroy them with his annotations. Once a possible means of lending credibility to their story if there were ever a chance for them to come out of hiding, now Simon pored over her letters searching for River-in-evolution, River-in-revolution.

Language could hide so much. He remembered there being a distinct time when he'd stopped being able to hear her voice through her handwriting. Language could uncover so much.

River had found those letters once, and he found her in the passenger dorms hunched gracefully over herself on his bed, the letters spread out before her on top of the blankets. Her fingers were tracing words, her eyes squinting between the lines as if she were looking into a blurry mirror, and not quite recognizing what she was seeing.

"I wrote these," she said quietly. Her forefinger touched upon the name _D'Arbanville. _"You kept them."

He'd missed her voice.

"Yes, I did," he said cautiously. "Is that okay?"

"You're still looking for me," she said. "Maybe you'll never stop."

"You're right here, _mei mei_," he said, easing down next to her slowly. "I already found you."

"You found me," River repeated. "I know. But maybe you don't."

"River," he tried to begin again, but had nowhere to go from there. It was a familiar feeling.

"_Mei mei,_" she said to herself contemplatively, eyes fixed somewhere past him. "Do you recognize her?"

"You're my sister," Simon told her. He hated it when she slipped into referring to herself in third person. "Of course I recognize you."

She looked at him appraisingly for a moment, then nodded and gathered up her letters. She handed them back to him, and stood.

"You won't find me in them," she said as she left, pausing in the doorframe, and then was gone.

iii.

The next time they went planetside, he bartered away one of the lesser essential items from the medical bag he'd brought onboard with him, getting a nice pocketful of change in return, some of which he used to buy a few sticks of digital music and a small audio set.

River's eyes were wide when he presented her with the music from Earth-That-Was: some Tchaikovsky, some Rimsky-Korsakov. She nearly bowled him over with the force of her hug.

"I know these were some of your favorites," Simon said, grinning. "I'm glad you like them."

"Good brother," she crooned complacently, patting his cheek with mischievously sparkling eyes, at once serious and unserious.

They were all serenaded with the classical strains trickling from the passenger dorms for almost a month before Simon saw River stretching in the cargo bay, rising experimentally in a mockery of pointe in her bare feet, executing pliés in first, second, fourth, and fifth positions. Then there were jetés across the space at night, and pirouettes and fouettes into the early morning when she'd had a nightmare, in a vacuum of sound. He remembered her brilliant smile in the dead of space as they'd clutched to _Serenity's _hull like the lifeline it was, how she'd seemed so vividly and incongruously happy as she kept her eyes fixed on the stars beyond the black; and he thought maybe this soundless sight wasn't such a contradiction after all.

That the coldness of space could be a kindred thing to his sister's soul, could be a kindred thing to his own soul, was not so startling as it might have been. There was a rawness to the hard shine of the stars, and it was as terrifying and beautiful as what he sensed in his sister at times, and as what he'd had to confront the years he'd made deal after deal to get her out.

That River could gaze at it with a smile on her face was, he thought, a testament to her own reconciliation with it. He wasn't sure how to feel about that.

One day, the music drifted from the cargo bay. Mal, Zoe, and Jayne were out on a job, and Book was doing garbage duty he'd gotten in losing their last poker game, but Kaylee and Inara were soon drawn to join Simon on the catwalk just above the space. It didn't matter, he rationally knew; River would no doubt be able to sense their presence, but she wasn't asking them to leave, and they could at least give her space. All of them, even Inara, sat with their legs dangling over the edge, Simon and Kaylee with their arms resting on the first bar: a motley audience indeed.

River had foregone her usual loose dress in favor of the exercise shorts someone had scrounged up for her right after they'd come aboard _Serenity_, as she often did when she wanted to dance in earnest. She'd pulled her hair back securely as well; and Simon, used to being struck by how childlike River often seemed, was all at once struck by the appearance of this grown woman, his sister.

River was starting the music, and Simon tried to place it. It was extremely familiar: the plaintive wail of the oboe, the momentary swells of the strings, the melancholy tone, the slow tempo.

"Is there a story?" Kaylee wanted to know, entranced, as River began to dance, slowly, sadly, languorously, impossibly.

"It's _Sleeping Beauty_," Inara said beside her, eyes fixed on River. "The vision scene, I think. The prince has been granted a vision of the princess. She dances in the vision, and, completely besotted with it, he begs to be shown where the actual princess is."

Below them, River was telling the story, conveying through the clean lines of her movements and limbs the energy and emotion of everything she couldn't make them understand in words. She danced with the weight of a hundred lifetimes; and this at least was easy to understand, but harder to comprehend.

She finished in fifth position relevé, holding it for a moment, and then dropping gracefully, her heels softly thumping against the hard floor in the sudden, still silence she'd left in the wake of her motion. There, she looked like a portrait in motion, reality imitating art: her eyelashes on her cheeks, her hair escaping the bun she'd put it into earlier, the strength in her relaxed pose, feet sure and arms gently curved. She existed in dissonant juxtaposition to the functionality and utility of the boxes behind her and gratings above her.

Kaylee had tears streaming down her face. "That's the prettiest thing I ever seen," she whispered. "It's like she feels _everything._"

River turned her face up to her as if she could hear what Kaylee was saying, and Simon almost broke at the stark beauty of her open expression. He thought about her brain scans, incision mark on incision mark. He'd never told the rest of them. _Lobotomize _meant so many things that weren't true. They hadn't cut her out, no, but they had taken something from her nevertheless.

"How can she stand it?" Kaylee asked, awe and sadness lacing her words.

_Maybe she doesn't, _he could almost hear River say, and her gaze turned on him instead.

"Improvisation forgives many faults when the audience doesn't know the intended final product," she said clearly. "But time is unforgiving when it hasn't contained practice. It wants to know things it can't, because repetition breeds familiarity, and I haven't. Several of the steps are lost to me. The dance is not formally correct."

"Don't make it less beautiful," Kaylee defended immediately. "We're all improvising here, River."

"Correctness is not subjective," River said more quietly to no one in particular. "Right and wrong is not the same as correct and incorrect. There are specifications that must be met. There is no room for moral vacillation: black and white, no grey. No grey."

Kaylee had already made her way down the stairs, and pulled River into a hug. "You go on and dance how you see fit_, mei mei_."

"We're in the black," River said, looking vacantly at Simon, taking no notice of Kaylee's first appropriation of the endearment.

She smiled. He shivered.

"Time to wake up," she said.


End file.
